Art Commentary: As Subjective as Art Itself

A quick read of Celia McGee’s 1995 “Portraiture Is Back” piece for the New York Times and Pernilla Holmes’s 2007 “In Your Face” article for ArtNews leaves an unwitting reader with the impression that portraiture had experienced a dramatic transformation over the course of a dozen years. McGee writes of a renewed interest in portraiture born of a recent focus on social issues like race, class, and gender, all inexorably leading to the deeply personal interface portraiture lends itself to between the artist, subject, and viewer. She provides only a handful of examples, but all of them grapple with gender, race, or personal identity, according to McGee. In stark contrast comes Holmes’s writing, which describes eleven bodies of work, most of which focus on people with whom neither the artist nor the viewer have any personal connection but through mass media: politicians, pop musicians, reality TV stars, athletes, and models. The work she describes does not make these figures any more accessible but rather heightens the concepts they represent: environmentalism, mass media, exploitation, and isolation. However, like the artists themselves, McGee and Holmes’s writings have more to do with their own frame of reference and subjective perspectives than a dramatic transformation in portraiture. The most notable flaw in the two articles is the lack of a comprehensive review of all types of media. McGee focuses on more traditional portraiture media like painting and sculpture, while Holmes seems to discuss everything but. Of course, these different focal points will lead to seemingly different types of “portraiture,” no matter when the articles were written.

Although McGee mentions many artists in her attempt to show that portraiture is “back,” she discusses only a few of them in detail, most of whom are painters and the rest are sculptors. Though she writes in the guise of an objective journalist, her selection of these types of artists is no mistake and reveals a romanticized notion of portraiture as an intimate process that only traditional media can truly capture. She notes, “Many artists believe that no mechanical means of reproduction should come between artist and subject in their intense connectedness.” Indeed, she is careful to explain that Chuck Close, best known for his photo-realistic paintings, has moved away from such stolid formalism to a more personalized, intimate approach to portraiture.

Holmes, on the other hand, cannot seem to get away from “mechanical means of reproduction.” Of the eleven bodies of work she covers, six of them work directly with photography or film, hardly the kind of mechanism-free nothing-between-you-and-me art-of-intimacy McGee envisioned. Of the remaining five, two actually work with photography as an integral part of their work—Nicolai’s “performance” piece really just being an elaborate staging for taking photographs and Herring’s sculptures comprised of collaged fragments of photographs—and one, Brian Alfred, does work inescapably entwined with technology as a device, since he bases his paintings off of pictures taken from the internet. Compared with McGee’s intimate “menage a trois…among artist, subject and viewer,” these mechanically-induced portraits are sure to seem more impersonal, detached, less imbued with the artist’s presence, and therefore more conceptual in nature.

While Chuck Close is the perfect example of how a painting can look like a photograph (and certainly the opposite can be true), different media, like different art forms, experience their own trajectories in art history. While some themes might move between music, visual arts, and writing simultaneously, they are also distinct art forms that evolve at their own pace. Similarly, photography, sculpture, painting, performance art, and movie-making are all very different approaches to the visual arts. This begs the question: what conclusions might have McGee drawn if she had looked at photography or performance art for her article? Similarly, what might have Holmes seen if she had included more than just one painter in hers? By the way, that painter, Brian Alfred, does small paintings of people he admires, including friends and family, in an attempt to portray his own identity. He exemplifies the kind of art McGee described in her article over ten years earlier and shows that, at least in the realm of portraiture painting, perhaps there has been no change at all.

Even within the media McGee and Holmes selectively review, a scan of 500 Self-Portraits suggests they are just cherry-picking examples to make their own points. Adrian Piper’s 1981 “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features” certainly seems to be striving for individuality in the context of race and ethnicity at least as much as McGee’s example—nearly 15 years later—of Dennis Kardon’s “Jewish noses” sculpture series. Chuck Close’s 1991 self-portrait, comprised of small amoeba-like shapes, seems far more a formal exercise and much less personal than his photo-realistic “Big Self Portrait” from 1967-8, suggesting the trend McGee described with him might actually have been happening in reverse, if at all. Cindy Sherman’s self-portrait is a photograph that “quotes” Ingres much in the same way that Holmes describes contemporary portraiture as doing nearly twenty years later. Similarly, Shirin Neshat’s “Seeking Martyrdom” from 1995 is as every bit as conceptual and “in your face” as Holmes’s repertoire of examples from a decade later.

From these examples, it seems impossible to conclude anything from a comparison of McGee and Holmes’s articles other than the fact that they, like the artists they write about, are creating their own stories from personal observations and subjective experience. If asked directly, they would likely define portraiture differently, know of vastly different types of artists, and therefore see completely different trends in the exact same period of time. Portraiture in 2007 may well have been very different from portraiture in 1995, but we would not know it from these two articles.

Color Analysts, Pink Is not Cool

Most experts advise that people with pink undertones have “cool” skin while those with yellow undertones have “warm” skin, but this advice is so misleading that even color “experts” get confused.  For example, the color analyst behind Style Makeover claims that most people have “warm” skin, while Mineral Makeup Reviews argues the opposite is true. Part of the problem is that both yellow and pink are on the whole warm colors, and some yellows can be cooler than some pinks. Therefore, ascertaining whether you have a pink or yellow undertone does not help you determine whether you have warm or cool skin.

• Pink Is not (Always) Cool. Some experts would have you believe that simply seeing pink in your skin means that your skin is “cool” and therefore you are a “Summer” or a “Winter” color type for the sake of color coordination in clothing and make-up. Indeed, articles around the internet almost universally describe cool Winters as having pink undertones to their skin (Widipedia, Associated Content,TheSoko.com). However, Color for Men says that most “Winters…are those with gray-beige skin…usually with no visible pink.” Color for Men also explains that Autumns can be pink, “but the pink is more peachy than blue.”
• Yellow Is not (Always) Warm. One testimonial on Yahoo! Answers nicely summarizes the prevailing wisdom of color analysts (pink vs yellow) while also pointing to why it’s a mistake to use yellow as the defining color for “warm” skin tones.

“Warm means you have yellow undertones, cool means you have pink undertones. However, extremely yellow undertones and olive tones (which are kind of greenish-yellow) can still be considered cool. Think of lemony yellow vs. golden yellow — the lemony yellow would be cool while the golden is warm. That’s why many Asians are cool even though they have yellow undertones.” – Yahoo! Answers

On your average color wheel, like the one below, it’s pretty clear that blue is the most quintessentially “cool” color while orange, its complement, is quintessentially “warm.” Some reds are warmer than others; some yellows are too. Likewise, both purple and green can get cooler. However, orange can get no warmer and blue no cooler–they are the definitions of the terms.

Why Pink and Yellow? After all, blue and orange are the very definitions of a cool and warm color, respectively.

Just to further prove the point, check out the confusion over the skin type of various celebrities on Pretty Your World and Mineral Makeup Reviews, both of which subscribe to the idea that pink is cool and yellow is warm. Pretty Your World has Gloria Estefan and Sophia Loren as Autumns (warm), but Mineral Makeup Reviews has them as a cool skin types. Meanwhile, Pretty Your World calls Aishwarya Rai a Winter (cool) while Mineral Makeup Reviews has her as an Autumn (warm).

I’m no expert myself, but it seems like people should instead be looking for whether they have blue or orange skin, not pink or yellow skin, to determine whether cool or warm colors suit them best. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I’ll cover the notion in my next post.

Contrasting Ship Series by Feininger & Dean

Recently investigating the artwork of Lyonel Feininger, I was struck by recurring theme of ships in his pieces held here in San Francisco. He seems captivated by the image of a ship at sea, coming back to it numerous times over at least 24 years from Hanseatic Fleet (1918) to Peaceful (1942). These works are essentially studies of composition and shape relations and, though they vary in energy, err on the side of stillness and permanence, emphasized by the frequent use of woodcuts. Though also of ships, Tacita Dean’s 2002 piece “Chere Petite Soeur,” could not be more different in nearly every way from Feininger’s studies.

The overall mood of Dean’s piece is intensely dramatic, and it instantly involves one as both a viewer of art and the reader of an unfolding story. The blackboard as a base layer literally establishes the foundation of a dark, ominous mood, that plays through the entire piece. The rendering of the ship(s) at sea is done so convincingly in chalk that the viewer is teleported to the scene, immediately involved in the danger taking place. The presentation of the piece as a diptych involves the viewer even more, creating a sequential story left for the viewer to complete.

The overall composition of the piece is powerful in both parts of the diptych, with dramatic contrasts of light and dark, chaotically varied use of line evocative of the storm the drawing depicts, and a strong horizontal orientation that accentuates the left-to-right reading of the two panels as a story. As the viewer moves closer, the technique and the medium become more apparent and are, in fact, quite surprising. Reading from a distance almost like a painting, the drawing itself is actually chalk on blackboard. In addition, the sweeping movement of the composition as a whole seems contradicted by the realization that each panel is actually a set of four smaller frames, meticulously delineated from one another.

Indeed, this closer investigation of the piece almost makes the initial intensity and drama of it recede as the viewer begins to question the essence of what exactly s/he is looking at? Perhaps this is not a story at all; perhaps we are not to have been “transported” to another place and time.

Perhaps, as Vitamin D suggests, the piece is about memory. Memory, like each panel of the diptych, is pieced together as we live our lives. In many cases, these pieces are disparate and not logically associated, like seeing your spouse in a dream about your childhood. However, particularly dramatic memories can be unforgettable, and traumatic ones tend to be relived with great clarity. Oddly, the small notes written into the piece create a technical sensibility, as if we are looking at the blueprint of a memory methodically reconstructed in all its intensity.

Finally, there exists the great irony of the piece, that it is drawn upon a blackboard that, while essential to the piece’s dramatic mood, is a surface meant to be erased. It leaves the thoughtful viewer with the notion that, after all this methodical reconstruction, the piece will simply disappear, as if it never was. What then, was the true purpose of it in the first place?

5 Free Webcomics Hosting Sites

I have relocated this post to Cheapskate Reviews. See you there!

5 Ways to Publish Your Comics Online

I have relocated this post to Cheapskate Reviews. See you there!

Emerging Artist: Tony Maridakis

"Lone Tree II" is one of Mr. Maridakis's recent works and is on display at 95 Third St. in San Francisco.

In the first of the Dead Dog Cafe’s Emerging Artist series, I will be discussing the background, inspirations, and motivations of the thoughtful surrealist painter Tony Maridakis of San Francisco.

Mr. Maridakis would have you think he has only recently discovered his talent for painting, but this guy has been a prodigy from the start.  Most people can lay claim to having some lost talent for drawing, painting, singing, or magical instrument playing from yesteryear, but few actually had their art exhibited publicly, much less in as well-trafficked a locale as the San Francisco International Airport.  Indeed, Mr. Maridakis’s groundbreaking painting using found objects (sponges) was so displayed when he was a kid.  Not only was the medium cutting edge, but the topic was sharp and contemporary: a quizzical exploration of the Miss America pageant.

Such talent is hard to come by, and even harder to contain, so what is it that took Mr. Maridakis decades to return to such an apparent love for art?  Like many of us, the soul-crushing mores of society distracted him from the truth and dragged him down a path beckoning money, security, and approval.  Despite the clear signage–promotions, success, raises–along this path, Mr. Maridakis began to feel increasingly lost and muddled.  His mind tormented with too much left-brain-driven thought about work, he sought refuge in the right side of his brain, which had somehow had the presence all along to surround Mr. Maridakis with a fine collection of artwork and artist friends.  From this foundation, he took his first steps just over ten years ago to reclaim his calling as an artist by taking a painting class.

Like any artist ascending the shambles of a crumbling past unsupported by the glories of art, Mr. Maridakis has been cautiously methodical, lest he slip and fall into the abyss of his formerly droll life.  Though his intent all along was to paint abstractly in oil, he began with watercolor, seeing a progression from watercolor to acrylic to oil; and with paintings true to life, with another progression in mind from realistic to surreal to abstract painting.  Initially just exploring the medium, Mr. Maridakis eventually lay the foundation for his current painting through this important phase of his work, as I described in a previous post.

Despite finding through watercolor the template for his current work by 2001, Mr. Maridakis did not fully release himself to explore his art until four years later.  In 2005, he found himself working at the Art Institute, where he had made sacrifices to contribute to the important work of and surround himself with artists.  At this time, he began to take classes there and traveled to locations that inspired his work, most recently spending about a year in Argentina.  He is continuing his art education right now through UC Berkeley’s post-baccalaureate program.

Mr. Maridakis counts as influences Van Gogh, El Greco, Volkov, Earhart Richter, Sonja Echart, Liberti, the latter two of which are Argentinian inspirations doing abstract landscapes and surrealism, respectively.  His work can be viewed online.

3arly 3xplorations: The Watercolors of Tony Maridakis

In Tony Maridakis’s (reviewed as an emerging artist here) early paintings, all done in watercolor, are the clear signs of a budding painter exploring the boundaries of the medium and searching for his own artistic aptitudes.  Mr. Maridakis’s work at this early stage already exhibits the tri-partite themes for which his work has presently become known.  Exploring subjects from still life to landscape and approaches from realistic to abstract, Mr. Maridakis experiments with different combinations thereof to find his strengths.  This essay discusses the two phases of his watercolor painting, their relationship to his current work, and his noteworthy watercolor masterpiece Colonia I.

• Early Watercolor: These initial efforts are exemplified in Plastic Gold Fish (1997), Tapestry (1996), and Vineyard (1996).  Here we see Mr. Maridakis experimenting with the basic elements of watercolor as a medium in three distinctly different paintings.  Plastic Gold Fish strives to be true to reality, capturing the visual character of a fish as one might see it in life, with correct proportions, a sense of shape, coloration, and depth.  In contrast, Vineyard is a more playful articulation, paying more heed to vibrant color and active gesture than holding to a crisp, realistic form.  Although this latter work becomes more abstract, that abstraction comes in through the act of simplified painting rather than in the selection of the image or the actual content of the painting.  An entirely different type of abstraction is apparent in Tapestry, a painting based on extremely simplified forms that seek not depict a unified landscape scene but rather strive to carve out their own space in this broad array of color and shape.  Flat in its depth, Tapestry brings the viewer’s attention to the relationships between the shapes and colors.  It builds a vaguely realistic object from the variety of semi-realistic forms and abstractions, but the point is clearly not to depict a work of woven art in painted form.  Here, Mr. Maridakis has taken his watercoloring from realism to abstraction within the course of his first year of handling this medium.
• Late Watercolor: Mr. Maridakis’s work progresses over the next few years, taking similar scenes but pushing them in the opposite direction of how he had painted them before and laying the foundation for his current paintings in acrylic and oil, as can be seen in Baccus (2001), Vineyard II (2001), and Landscape I & II (2001).  As if to demonstrate his aptitude for all varieties of style, Mr. Maridakis takes the gestural and colorful Vineyard I scene and renders it more delicately with muted colors.  The forms themselves are placed and shaped similarly; the hill for example remains a simplified form comprised of three straight lines for the horizon and serving more as a palette upon which the Mr. Marikdakis paints the patterns of the earth rather than an indicator of depth or shape.  However, the painting seems entirely different in its mood on account of the changes in color and gesture.  Baccus can perhaps be associated with Plastic Gold Fish as straight-forward still life renderings, but again Mr. Maridakis takes the style in the opposite direction.  Where Plastic Gold Fish showed subtle depth and form, Baccus focuses boldly on simplified, flat, pattern-like shapes of the glass and grapes.  As with the earlier Vineyard I, the gesture in the painting is clear, and, though the palette is limited only to black and white, the use of these colors is bolder.  Finally, though the association might not be apparent at first, the Landscape I & II pieces can be seen as a progression of Tapestry.  Although the scene is clearly based on life and the viewer can sense the implied depth, the painting is not about creating a sense of space but rather showing vibrant and colorful shapes, each bearing its own weight in the composition and coming to the fore in its own right, just as in Tapestry.  This relationship is made even more apparent through observation of the lower portion of the painting where a patterned, tapestry-like segment has been directly pasted over the original and least vibrant section of the original painting.
• Relationship to Current Painting: Although Mr. Maridakis discusses only two groups of paintings in his Artist Statement, it is generally accepted by the art world that his work today falls into three categories, each of which is an outgrowth of the distincts areas of exploration during his watercolor phase.  The “Lone Tree” series is clearly a continuation of “Vineyard I” and “Vineyard II,” taking the image of trees on a hill, paring it down to one simple tree, and imbuing the painting with symbolic meaning through the surreal coloration and nearly archetypal imagery.  His “Estudio” series–including “Estudio en Azul,” “Estudio en Amarillo,” and “Estudio en Divinidad“–is an extension of “Bacchus,” which might have been called “Estudio en Negro y Blanco.”  In these, Mr. Maridakis again makes color, contrast, and fluid brushstrokes the focal points of his canvas, but this time the art is seemingly devoid of any basis in reality.*  Finally, Mr. Maridakis’s “Landscape I & II” serve as ample prelude to his noteworthy “Océanos Imaginadas” series, all of which show a landscape with limited foreground and divided near the middle of the painting by a horizon.  Although the elements of tapestry and patterning are less apparent, they are still present in these surreal paintings in a number of ways, including the repetition of the oblong oval shape, the patterning effect of the stones on the ground, the disconnection between the light between the sky and the earth, the separation of the paintings into smaller scenes, and finally the overall organization of these paintings as a tryptich.
• Culmination of Watercolor Painting: I would be remiss in discussing Mr. Maridakis’s watercolors without calling attention to Colonia I, his singular masterpiece of this era in his painting.  In this painting, we see all of the themes and styles of his prior watercolor coming into balance.  Depicting a colorful building running along an inviting avenue, Colonia strikes an interesting balance between still life and landscape.  Certainly, the outdoor scene with trees, buildings, and marked depth perspective can be considered a landscape, but the building itself consumes so much of the painting that other traditional elements of landscape painting, such as the sky and the foreground, are given very little space.  Indeed, the painting might also be considered a still life of a building, despite the lack of fruit and tablecloths in the scene.  The painting also strikes a balance between the realistic and the abstract.  The viewer does not question the scene’s “realism” overall, as the composition itself depicts this street scene quite realistically: the building recedes to the horizon correctly; the trees seem to arrange themselves in the right places around the facade; and the lighting seems consistent across the painting, creating a sense of depth that makes the painting sit well from a distance.  However, each element taken alone becomes abstracted and has more in common with Baccus than Plastic Gold Fish.  The trees are spherical clouds of painterly dabs within which in branches are nearly if not entirely lost.  The building itself is like a colorful painter’s palette cut into the shape of a building and placed on the page, such is the variety of brushwork and playfulness of the stroke.  Finally, the cobblestone street defies the rules of perspective, falling away before the viewer as it is painted as a flat array of rectangular blocks of muted color.  It is in this latter segment that the tapestratic approach of both Tapestry and Landscape I & II is most apparent, but the painting overall also possesses the same overall sensibility, placing simplified but individually vibrant shapes next to each other.

Patterning, shape relationships, vibrant color–all of these components that are to become signatures of Mr. Maridakis’s work are apparent in balanced form in Colonia I.  It is no surprise that he came back to this painting in Colonia II, but it is a surprise that the original is not up for sale on his online store.  This painting marks not only a culmination in his early watercolor paintings but also a turning point as he subsequently begins to explore acrylic and oil painting as noted above.

* For those who question the relationship between such “abstract” art and “Bacchus,” clearly derived from life, Mr. Maridakis’s “Comet” serves as an adequate middle ground, showing his transition between realism and abstraction in this strain of his work.

Flexner’s Drawing: Kind of Like Seurat but Very Different

Ronald Flexner’s portrait of a man, depicted below on the right, owes much to Seurat’s techniques in creating value but departs from Seurat in its thematic qualities of the depiction of time, the monumental scale on the page, and the level of intimacy.  This brief commentary reviews Flexner’s piece in terms of its thematic principles and visual style with a particular emphasis on its comparison to Seurat.

Flexner’s portrait clearly borrows from the visual style of Seurat but varies significantly from Seurat in its depiction of time.  The extremely granular nature of the drawing gives the viewer a sense of a seemingly infinite number of points of light, and any linear elements to the composition are lost in their accumulation.  While this approach readily falls into Seurat’s school of pointalism from purely analytical perspective, placing Flexner’s portrait side by side with an early sketch from Seurat like the one below makes the “point” even clearer.

Pointalistic Sketches: Seurat’s Seated Nude and Flexner’s portrait both rely on the variations of small points of light and dark to create value and form in their drawings.

Despite the similarities in visual affect, the two drawings vary considerably in how they depict time.  Seurat’s figure is still, almost sullen, perhaps having waited too long.  Although the image might seem to capture an instant in time, the figure seems as if it could have been in this same pose for hours or even days.  Even the lighting around the figure echoes its form, as if the air has settled in for the wait as well.  Flexner’s figure, on the other hand seems to have been caught in the moment.  Perhaps sleeping but about to turn over, perhaps breathing in or accepting a kind caress, the figure is still yet about to move, captured the very moment between poses.  The drawing seems more reminiscent of a grainy photograph taking in a mere instant than the patient, thoughtful drawing by Seurat on the left.

Also different from Seurat, Flexner’s portrait seeks to monumentalize in exquisite detail an ephemeral moment in time as completely as possible in a number of ways.  The portrait zooms in on the figure’s head such that it does not even fit on the entire page, creating a dramatic scene of an otherwise perhaps ordinary moment.  Flexner uses graphite as his medium, creating an extremely granular quality to the portrait and a sense that nearly every pore has been attended to.  This granularity extends to the entirety of the drawing, creating an almost tactile visual effect to the very air depicted around the figure.  Flexner is so effective in the depiction of a singular moment in time that the figure seems nearly to be breathing inward at the very moment portrayed in the drawing.

Despite the monumental scale of the head on the page, the granularity of the sketch lends itself to a intimacy that is carried out in other ways as well.  The sense that the viewer is sharing this moment in such specific detail with the subject of the portrait even as the subject seems unaware of the viewer’s gaze creates a remarkable intimacy to the portrait.  This intimacy combines with the monumentality of the portrait to relay a certain sensuality: the eye is drawn to the curve of the neck, the cheek that recedes into darkness on the lefthand side, the chin that softly lies across the center of the drawing.  The portrait could have been monumental in an imposing way, but Flexner keeps the harsh angles of the face off to the side so they are not the focal point of the drawing.  Instead, the portrait monumentalizes a sensual moment that engages not only the eye but nearly the viewer’s senses of touch and smell.

I must confess my interest in Flexner’s drawing was not deeply considered: his drawing jumped out at me, and I decided I’d think about the appeal later in writing this commentary.  It was actually through my master sketches of Seurat that I came to truly appreciate Flexner’s drawing.  I tend to rely heavily on line accumulation to create value, which leads to a somewhat dynamic, shifting form on the page.  Seurat and Flexner are both using media that rely on line accumulation but their attention to detail is so fine that the lines are completely lost in favor of the soft focus on varying points of light and dark across the page.  They are able to achieve a level of stillness and intimacy that is usually absent from my own drawings but through media I feel comfortable using and can fully appreciate.  Hopefully, I will be able to take these observations and execute them in my own drawings in the future.

Post-Baccalaureate Programs in Fine Art

For those who maybe regret not finishing off a major in Art, want to switch careers, or simply solidify or formalize a potentially lifelong passion, attaining a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine/Studio Art could be a viable path ["More than Bachelor, Less than a Master," New York Times]. While I’m sure many colleges and universities can easily accommodate adding a fifth year onto a four-year BA program to allow students to double-major in art as well as their original area of study, individuals who have been out of school for a while need to figure out how to start new, probably at a different institution. Unfortunately, no web page summarizes the programs available, so I’ll do my best here to post what I found in the first hundred results of a Google search for “post-baccalaureate” and “art”. The dollar amount in parentheses after each institution’s name is the annual tuition.

1. Top Tier MFA Programs with Post-Bac Options: Both the Art Institute of Chicago ($33,000) and the Maryland Institute College of Art ($32,000) offer post-bac certificates while also being highly-regarded in the US News and World Report rankings of graduate programs in fine arts. Say what you will about the rankings, but if you are set on getting into a “top” school, making art into a profession, and are willing to pay the premium tuition, then attending one of these schools could be a good move. Although admission to MFA programs is not guaranteed and credits do not transfer from post-bac programs to graduate study, making connections and involving yourself in the art community at the schools can only enhance your ability to attend them full-time as an MFA student. Just to be sure, I dug into the other top-ten programs and did not find post-bac opportunities at any of them.
2. Affordable Post-Bac Options: Brandeis ($17,500), Berkeley ($5,700), and the Lyme Academy ($19,000) all offer post-baccalaureate certificates for considerably less tuition than most of the other programs available. If you aren’t going to a top program or just want this to be a formalization of a lifelong passion, I’m hard pressed to come up with a reason why you would not consider one of these options. Brandeis’ program might be more affordable because it only offers 2 and 3 courses per semester, though it is a full-time residency program. At just $455 per class, Berkeley could be the hands-down best deal, but its program is run by UC Extension, the continuing education branch of Berkeley.  Therefore, classes meet once a week during evenings and weekends; these would be considered casual audits and not worthy of any degree or certificate at another program.  In addition, as a non-degree continuing education program, Berkeley classes are not eligible for federal student loans, so you will have to find private loans or pay out of pocket.  I’m not sure why someone would pay more to attend the Lyme Academy in Connecticut; to me, it seems like urban culture is central to a vibrant arts community. It is, however, more affordable than the following options.
3. Other Post-Bac Options: The San Francisco Art Institute ($32,000), Minneapolis College of Art and Design* ($28,000), and School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston ($31,000) all offer post-bac certificates, but at the premium prices of top-ranked options without the supposed prestige of a high ranking in US News. Unless you are specifically tied to a particular area, I’m not sure why you would attend one of these schools instead of the options in 1 and 2 above. Then again, I’ve barely put a pen to paper, much less brush to canvas, in about ten years, so I’ll likely be a beggar rather than a chooser should I go this route. These three programs could be my only recourse.

Having just dissed three post-bac programs, it would do me well to remember that posting ancient drawings to DeviantArt.com is about all the "artwork" I've done in the past ten years.

Post-bac programs like these are the only recourse for people who definitely want an MFA but don’t have the undergraduate degree or portfolio to get into a graduate program. However, for someone who is just trying to reinvigorate a lost-lost passion or right a past wrong, diving into even $15,000 (Berkeley) of debt can be an expensive way to go. On the other hand, what’s all the money from lucrative professions for INTJs supposed to go toward anyway? The worst thing that happens is that I take a year, decide I don’t want to do this, exorcise my prior regrets, and easily pay off my loans after an MBA. The upside is that I rediscover an old passion and am then able to continue to pursue it with an MFA program.

* Note that the application instructions state that you must submit 20 slides.  My correspondence with their admissions department has revealed that their online information is dated and that they actually prefer digital submissions.

Swarthmore’s Athletic Facilities & the Timeless Way of Building

Originally written for Professor Barnett’s Theory and Principles of Urban Design class at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2003.

____________

Ancient, Renaissance (as per Wittkower), Modern (Le Corbusier), and Postmodern (New Urbanist) architects have their own formulations regarding the creation of desirable ensembles of buildings.  Whether they espouse that buildings should be designed according to an underlying idea of proportions, attuned to musical harmonies, organized on superblocks, or arranged around quaint town squares, all of these architectural movements share a common underlying assumption that desirable buildings and ensembles thereof will necessarily adhere to a particular set of proportions and principles that can be clearly articulated.  Christopher Alexander defies most of this by proclaiming that truly desirable buildings adhere not to clearly-stated laws but to the inexplicable “timeless way of building.”  While his pseudo-philosophical delivery is aggravating and his treatment of ensembles of buildings limited, Alexander presents a theory with underlying validity.  This post will discuss the athletic facilities at Swarthmore College as an example of an ensemble of buildings that follow the “timeless way”.  The next post notes some of the problematic elements of Alexander’s “timeless way”.

The athletic facilities at Swarthmore College provide a fine example of a “desirable ensemble” of buildings.  Before any of the facilities were constructed, a lone maroon barn with a gabled roof looked out upon the school’s future playing fields.  Built in 1935 right next to this barn, the Lamb-Miller Field House was the first facility completed, containing an indoor track surrounding basketball and tennis courts and surrounded by weight rooms, locker rooms, and administrative offices.  In Illustration 1, it is quite apparent that the long, low-lying monolith dominates the space in which it resides.  Its situation at the foot of the hill that overlooks the entire township (not seen in the illustration) only adds to the visual weight of the building, as if it has sunk gradually into the ground.  Although the interior is well-designed, making excellent use of its space and clearly fulfilling a number of functional roles, the form of the structure overall does not possess any redeeming or noteworthy features beyond its visual weight, and it was unrelated in form or function to the neighboring barn.

Illustration 1: The Lamb-Miller Field House, Swarthmore College, PA

In 1978, Swarthmore built the Tarble Pavilion, an annex to the field house that tied the scene together.  Illustration 2 reveals a partially-gabled roof atop the pavilion, which relates the structure to the neighboring barn.  Simultaneously, the roof is split down the middle by a cylindrical dome that mirrors the roof of the adjacent field house.  In color, the pavilion also ties the mauve of the field house to the maroon of the barn by averaging the two colors together on its own façade with a mauve-maroon mixture, though the subtle difference between the pavilion’s color and that of the field house is not apparent in the illustrations.  The strong horizontal beige stripe pays homage to the elongated wall of the same color on the field house, but the majority of the pavilion’s wall is painted red like the barn.  In a strange way, the pavilion seems to be the visual result of removing the roof from the field house, placing the barn on top of it, and then placing the roof back on top of the barn.  In sheer volume and height as well, the pavilion brings the barn and the field house together:  It rises above the field house, providing an anchor for it in on the horizon, without which earth certainly would have subsumed the field house by now; yet it does not seem quite as tall as the barn, whose sharply angled roof allows it to exceed its height. Although the rounded skylights provide pleasant lighting for the basketball court within, few of the pavilion’s attributes discussed here are functionally necessary, unless building the connection between two estranged buildings can be understood as a worthwhile task.

Illustration 2: Tarble Pavilion, Swarthmore College, PA

Although clearly a part of the ensemble of athletic facilities, the Ware Swimming Pool, built in 1981, stakes a claim for individuality.  Illustration 3 shows the continuation of the mauve-maroon-red theme, but the beige is lost except in a bit of lining on the edge of the roof.  Perhaps the spire of the roof can be compared to the gabled roof of the barn, but the pool’s situation on the far side of the field house, even depressed into the ground somewhat, eliminates the building’s ability to communicate with the barn or the pavilion in the skyline of the ensemble.  The roof’s wavelets serve instead as an artful representation of the activity occurring inside the building.  Thus, despite tipping its hat to the structures around it, the building takes advantage of its diminutive size and offset situating to make a playful statement that pushes the boundary of the doctrine that function defines form.

Illustration 3: Ware Swimming Pool, Swarthmore College, PA

The quality of the ensemble has become more apparent recently.  A couple years ago, the barn’s paint was removed, revealing the weathered pine underneath.  Now light brown, the barn contrasts poorly with its ensemble neighbors, standing out starkly on the field and constantly drawing the viewer’s eye back to its relatively bright facade.  Ironically the building that pavilion sought to reconcile with the field house has revoked its community and stands steadfastly apart.  In its absence, the formerly coherent ensemble feels glaringly awry.

The Swarthmore ensemble exemplifies Alexander’s “timeless way” of building.  Without careful observation and without the benefit of disruptive change, the athletic facilities blend into each other to the casual passerby.  In going unnoticed, the buildings could in one sense be examples of Alexander’s inexplicable “timeless way”; without knowing why, one simply feels that the buildings are “just right”.  Like a well-spiced dish in which the flavors compliment and balance one another, the facilities bear no notice or complaint.  They have clearly been molded to some extent by the “pattern” of history insofar as they incorporate styles from across the twentieth century.  Yet the individual buildings form a coherent whole, which, while stopping short of inciting the “glow” of life within the viewer, displayed a remarkable sense of balance and integration, hallmarks of the “timeless way.”